Is
it possible to imagine a more obnoxious response to the Occupy Wall
Street movement? "Sophistication" is of course a word defined by these
bankers as seeing things
precisely their way, as buying into the whole rigged system that the
movement exists to protest. They clearly believe that, without an
MBA, people lack standing to critique the very entities that are
screwing them.

We've seen this sort of thing before, of course: Henry Kissinger
regarded the
anti-nuclear movement as naive. Opponents of the Vietnam War were
initially dismissed as ignorant dupes with no grasp of geopolitics.
Civil rights activists were shrugged off as utopian idealists lacking
any sense of the country's history and traditions and the realities
of federalism. And all were labeled, at one time or another,
Communists. People with a stake in the status quo usually choose to
see their position as natural and unalterable, and regard those in dissent
as dunces or villains.

Which is not to say the movement isn't incoherent, inconsistent, and
lacking a clear program. I recently heard Michael Moore give his
version of
the movement's demands, and it amounted, unsurprisingly, to a groaning
buffet table of the progressive causes with which he's been associated,
many of them unachievable from a practical point of view, and some of
them far removed from the grievances that have actually driven people
into the street. He seemed to be trying to take ownership of the
protest, and in his zeal missed some of the point. And I recently heard
Republican Nicolle Wallace assail Occupy Wall Street for its lack of
any
credible spokesperson who could speak responsibly for the movement as a
whole. She too was missing the point, looking for a lobbying operation
while watching a street demonstration.

Popular protest isn't
about a neat, discrete set of demands, even when it pretends to be. Maybe the Boston (as distinct from the contemporary) Tea Party was an
exception, although even there, I suspect the tea tax was in fact but
one grievance among many. But with every protest movement I've
witnessed personally, a poll of the participants would have revealed a
cacophony of conflicting intent. When the issue was Vietnam, I marched
with people who wanted to see Ho Chi Minh victorious, and people who
merely wanted a finite pause in Johnson's bombing campaign, and those who
wanted the troops brought home immediately, without negotiations and
without regard to consequences. Anyone who took part in any civil
rights demonstrations knows the spectrum of demands being advocated,
from an end to segregation to financial reparations for slavery to some
intimidating, unelaborated version of black power. When I went to march against the
Iraq War in London in 2003, there were at least as many anti-Zionist
placards on display as those specifically related to the war policies of
Bush and Cheney. And as for today's Tea Party ... well, don't get me started.

No,
public protest isn't about anything as mundane as ten-point programs
and lists of demands. It has its purpose, and its justification, in
manifesting
public discontent with things the participants regard as profoundly
wrong,
profoundly in need of repair. It's far too messy a medium of
expression to allow for a practical strategy of redress. In today's
situation, after an almost inexplicable period of quiescence, a large
number of people are finally willing to say, That's enough. Wealth
disparity in this country is obscene. The absence of regulation of
financial institutions has proved catastrophic. The decisive influence
of money in our politics has distorted the process beyond anything the
Founders could have imagined, let alone foreseen. These things are
threatening democracy. They've already gone a considerable distance
toward subverting it.

Every protester may have his or her own proposed
solution. That simply doesn't matter. What does matter is that popular
refusal to tolerate the current state of affairs appears to be reaching a
tipping point. The prosaic, technical work of finding some
ameliorating, and no doubt less than thorough, way of making things
somewhat better is a matter for elected officials and those who beaver
away in government agencies, and won't look exciting and won't provide
much in the way of emotional release, and may well feel like a serious
anticlimax after all the hoopla, all the tumult and the shouting. But
it's the way politics works. It's the way things change. It's the way
the unromantic, prosaic, desk-bound people who make our laws and administer our
country get things done. I don't have a problem with that. It's every
bit as essential as storming the barricades.

If enough law-makers
come to understand that the situation is intolerable, and much more
important, that it no longer will be tolerated, then it may just change. The
Glass-Steagall Act wasn't, after all, The Marseillaises. It didn't have to be.

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Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Since the end of World War II, the most crucial underpinning of freedom in the world has been the vigor of the advanced liberal democracies and the alliances that bound them together. Through the Cold War, the key multilateral anchors were NATO, the expanding European Union, and the U.S.-Japan security alliance. With the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO and the EU to virtually all of Central and Eastern Europe, liberal democracy seemed ascendant and secure as never before in history.

Under the shrewd and relentless assault of a resurgent Russian authoritarian state, all of this has come under strain with a speed and scope that few in the West have fully comprehended, and that puts the future of liberal democracy in the world squarely where Vladimir Putin wants it: in doubt and on the defensive.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

Modern slot machines develop an unbreakable hold on many players—some of whom wind up losing their jobs, their families, and even, as in the case of Scott Stevens, their lives.

On the morning of Monday, August 13, 2012, Scott Stevens loaded a brown hunting bag into his Jeep Grand Cherokee, then went to the master bedroom, where he hugged Stacy, his wife of 23 years. “I love you,” he told her.

Stacy thought that her husband was off to a job interview followed by an appointment with his therapist. Instead, he drove the 22 miles from their home in Steubenville, Ohio, to the Mountaineer Casino, just outside New Cumberland, West Virginia. He used the casino ATM to check his bank-account balance: $13,400. He walked across the casino floor to his favorite slot machine in the high-limit area: Triple Stars, a three-reel game that cost $10 a spin. Maybe this time it would pay out enough to save him.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

A report will be shared with lawmakers before Trump’s inauguration, a top advisor said Friday.

Updated at 2:20 p.m.

President Obama asked intelligence officials to perform a “full review” of election-related hacking this week, and plans will share a report of its findings with lawmakers before he leaves office on January 20, 2017.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Eric Schultz said Friday that the investigation will reach all the way back to 2008, and will examine patterns of “malicious cyber-activity timed to election cycles.” He emphasized that the White House is not questioning the results of the November election.

Asked whether a sweeping investigation could be completed in the time left in Obama’s final term—just six weeks—Schultz replied that intelligence agencies will work quickly, because the preparing the report is “a major priority for the president of the United States.”

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

We can all agree that Millennials are the worst. But what is a Millennial? A fight between The New York Times and Slate inspired us to try and figure that out.

This article is from the archive of our partner .

We can all agree that Millennials are the worst. But what is a Millennial? A fight between The New York Times and Slate inspired us to try and figure that out.

After the Times ran a column giving employers tips on how to deal with Millennials (for example, they need regular naps) (I didn't read the article; that's from my experience), Slate's Amanda Hess pointed out that the examples the Times used to demonstrate their points weren't actually Millennials. Some of the people quoted in the article were as old as 37, which was considered elderly only 5,000 short years ago.

The age of employees of The Wire, the humble website you are currently reading, varies widely, meaning that we too have in the past wondered where the boundaries for the various generations were drawn. Is a 37-year-old who gets text-message condolences from her friends a Millennial by virtue of her behavior? Or is she some other generation, because she was born super long ago? (Sorry, 37-year-old Rebecca Soffer who is a friend of a friend of mine and who I met once! You're not actually that old!) Since The Wire is committed to Broadening Human Understanding™, I decided to find out where generational boundaries are drawn.